A recurring motif permeates many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept that stretches back in time to the days of the Little Tramp. In the new *Superman* film, the evil force is a envious, ruthless billionaire using his enormous resources to defame Earth's mightiest protector while manipulating world events for personal gain. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing a fortune to cast the heroes into a dinosaur-packed danger zone for personal amusement. In *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of extremely affluent lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Tradition of On-Screen Wealth Disparity
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, Josh Brolin portrays a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through extreme hardship, while using deepfakes and a powerful propaganda machine to portray them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight class division as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's poorest citizens, forcing them out of jobs and into cages or slavery. The Chinese animated hit *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top film, pits the tough people of a struggling farm town against condescending upper classes who live in extravagant gold-and-jade palaces in the sky. Even, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's plan to cause planetary doom — to make money, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a string of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have disproportionate control, lack ethics or compassion, and a bottomless, entitled desire for increased fortune. "Rich people are villains and plucky heroes are heroes" as a plot device goes back to the early days of film, with early comedies contrasting his always poor Little Tramp character against fat cats, authority figures, and clueless rich men. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" films of the 1930s to the 1980s dance movies that revised a similar story for the era of the greedy, harmful tech-bro villain, the whole legacy of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which presume that wealth is incompatible with fundamental decency, and exalt the overthrowing, defeat, and sometimes elimination of elite figures.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
Nevertheless, inexplicably, we never actually eating the rich. Every time lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting violent video games, I feel exasperated, because if people really were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the societal mindset — certainly American society would not persistently revere billionaires. And yet the daily reports demonstrates every single day that a significant portion of Americans innately associate wealth with intelligence and social worth, even after one hundred years of cinema's biggest movies conveying the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the constant stream of eat-the-rich storylines in American cinema has given us a relief valve that gets in the way of meaningful change. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting tales where the underdog wins, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can leave the theater satisfied about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that society is just, and that determined protagonists will weed out any bad apples among the generally hard-working, virtuous, deserving wealthy who lifted themselves through sheer effort.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
Although 2025's movies aren’t new in that respect, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among class warfare stories: They’re getting more furious, more incisive, more direct, and observably more fatal. It is seldom sufficient nowadays to see rich people be taught a lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or be stripped of wealth to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, greedy, hateful wealthy people were slaughtered by legendary creatures (*Death of a Unicorn*) and devoured by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were obliterated on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face point blank on a broadcast (*The Running Man*). They were killed with a corkscrew (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s super-wealthy villains get the packed into a police car conclusion, possibly since it’s become so apparent that rich people operate under a separate justice system, and are all too likely to negotiate their release."
The "off to face justice" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Rather, these villains are likely to meet their end at the final act of their movies, often in particularly brutal, poetic ways.
Significant Exclusions
There are exceptions, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Monstrous manipulator Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* finds himself banished to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for future installments. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
